A floor price is the minimum CPM a publisher will accept before an ad impression goes unfilled or falls to backfill demand. In a programmatic auction, any bid below the floor is rejected — the impression either routes to a lower-priority demand source or runs a house ad. Floors protect your inventory from being undervalued and signal to the market what your content environment is worth.
There are two types: a hard floor is an absolute minimum — any bid below it is rejected outright. A soft floor is a threshold that changes how the auction clears: bids above the soft floor compete normally, but bids below it may still win at the soft floor price rather than the second-price, extracting more value from buyers who bid low strategically. Hard floors are simpler and more common among India CTV publishers.
The key trade-off: higher floors produce better CPMs on impressions that sell, but lower fill rates. Lower floors mean more inventory fills, but at weaker prices. The goal is the floor that maximises total revenue per available impression — not just the CPM or the fill rate independently. The right way to find that floor is bid landscape analysis: ask your SSP for a distribution of bids on your inventory, then set your floor just below the cluster of bids rather than arbitrarily.
For India CTV publishers, rough starting ranges by content type: live sport ₹400–₹800, premium VOD ₹200–₹450, general VOD ₹100–₹250, FAST ₹80–₹200. These are orientation points — your actual floors should be calibrated to your bid data and reviewed quarterly. Setting floors based on global benchmarks will result in very low fill rates given that India CTV CPMs are significantly below US or European levels.
Full guide
For a complete explanation, read: How to set floor prices for CTV ad inventory in India: a publisher's guide